Improving access to scholarly journals is not a typical student rallying cry, but a growing organization thinks it should be.
The Right to Research Coalition, which says it represents student groups comprising 5.5 million members in the United States and several other countries, unveiled a Web site and blog in October to educate and connect students about open-access publishing, and increase pressure on publishers and scholars to make their work freely available online.
Unlike rising textbook costs—a point of contention on college campuses—journal subscription costs often go unnoticed by students, say coalition leaders. They hope the Web site will show the impact that open-access publishing could have on students’ individual research and on scholarship around the globe, especially as cash-strapped academic libraries cut expensive journal subscriptions.
An international team of researchers has developed a new way to turn photographs from the media-sharing sites like Flickr into intricate 3-D computer models using only a home computer.
The new technique—developed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and ETH Zurich—streamlines a complex process that previously required clusters of dozens of computers. Researchers say they believe the new technology could spark a host of 3-D-modeling projects that are crowdsourced, with photos taken by tourists and posted online. “The data acquisition and computation can be outsourced to the people themselves,” said Jan-Michael Frahm, an assistant professor of computer science at Chapel Hill and a lead researcher.
To show off the technique, the research team created 3-D models of several famous landmarks in Rome (the same challenged tackled in a similar visualization …
Fans of The Social Network know the kind of buzz a Web site that lets students rank classmates based on their photos can cause. The film dramatically shows how, before he created Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built a picture-comparison Web site that famously received hundreds of visitors within a few hours. Nearly a decade later, a Zuckerberg-inspired Web site at Boston University is generating some major traffic—and controversy—of its own.
Since it went live on December 3, RateBU.com, which lets anyone with a Boston University e-mail address upload and rate pictures of female students, has amassed 4,000 registered users and drawn the ire of student-government leaders and university administrators.
On Monday, the university’s student senate voted unanimously to pass a resolution condemning the site and discouraging students from signing on. The site “encourages a culture of…
A major administrative restructuring at the Harvard University Library announced this week could mean greater coordination of technology services across the university’s vast and somewhat fragmented collection.
Based on recommendations from a library task force published last year, the reorganization will replace the present decentralized leadership structure at the university’s 70 campus libraries with a single governing body. The new Library Board—which will be installed next year—will include faculty and deans from a variety of disciplines, and it will be charged with appointing an executive director to manage the new unified library system.
“The decentralized aspects of our system that facilitated the growth of Harvard’s collections are now straining our ability to meet our patrons’ needs,” said David C. Lamberth, a divinity school professor and chair of the Harvard Library…
Adoption of digital textbooks has moved at a snail’s pace on most college campuses. But at Trine University’s School of Professional Studies, that shift is being jump-started with a new collegewide mandate to adopt e-textbooks in all courses by January.
The School of Professional Studies—which has 500 adult students enrolled in 10 degree programs online and at branch campuses across Indiana—hopes the e-textbook push will help students save money, boost sustainability, and enhance classroom and online instruction.
Starting next semester, faculty members will be required to teach from digital editions of their textbooks using the CaféScribe platform, operated by the Follett Higher Education Group. The Web-enabled e-textbook system allows students to highlight and take notes on the text while they read as well as compare notes and discuss their reading in online forums….
The networking consortium Internet2 announced today that it will continue to allow the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, a National Science Foundation-backed effort to reinvent the Internet, to use bandwidth on its national backbone through 2012.
Internet2, a not-for-profit consortium of 200 universities, 70 corporations, and 50 government agencies, will continue to provide high-speed connections to its national network at eight different backbone locations across the country. The connections will allow the GENI project, which includes researchers from across the country, to conduct critical Web experiments on isolated networks without interrupting the flow of data on the commercial Internet. “The academic community believes that it’s critical that it maintain its role in evolving the Internet,” said Randy Frank, Internet2′s chief technology officer. And Internet2′s…
Facebook has changed the way students, faculty members, and administrators communicate outside the classroom. Now, with the introduction of the London School of Business & Finance’s Global MBA Facebook app, Facebook is becoming the classroom.
The Global MBA app—introduced in October—lets users sample typical business-school courses like corporate finance and organizational behavior through the social-networking site. The free course material includes interactive message boards, a note-taking tool, and video lectures and discussions with insiders from industry giants like Accenture Management Consulting and Deloitte. This may be a good way to market a school, notes an observer from a business-school accrediting organization, but it may not be the best way to deliver courses.
Unlike most online business courses, the Global MBA program will not require students to pay an…
A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points—but it can also be the dullest.
A professor’s new mobile app called Serendipitor is helping smartphone users discover the road less traveled with the help of location-based technology. Rather than finding the shortest route between two points, the Google Maps-enable iPhone application generates a circuitous trip plan that actually encourages users to get lost along the way. The app also includes suggestions for activities—like sitting under a tree or befriending a neighborhood dog—that are meant to free urban dwellers from the monotony of their daily commute.
“The more we rely on GPS, the less we develop a consciousness of what happens between Point A and Point B,” said Mark Shepard, an assistant professor of architecture and media studies at the University of Buffalo who designed the app.
The head of an online news program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill resigned on Tuesday, days after admitting that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with an undergraduate student, according to college officials.
Monty Cook, who was hired in March as the executive producer at the Reese Felts Digital News Project, submitted a resignation letter as administrators at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication prepared to recommend that the university fire him. Mr. Cook had engaged in a romantic relationship with a female student who was employed by the news project. According to Jean Folkerts, dean of the journalism school, the relationship—uncovered last week—violated university policy prohibiting such relationships between faculty and students over whom they have authority. Because the student was both Mr. Cook’s student and employee, the relationship…
Despite predictions that the growth of online education would begin to level off, colleges reported the highest-ever annual increase in online enrollment—more than 21 percent—last year, according to a report on an annual survey of 2,600 higher-education institutions from the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group.
In fall 2009, colleges—including public, nonprofit private, and for-profit private institutions—reported that one million more students were enrolled in at least one Web-based course, bringing the total number of online students to 5.6 million. That unexpected increase—which topped the previous year’s 17-percent rise—may have been helped by higher demand for education in a rocky economy and an uptick in the number of colleges adopting online courses.
Although the survey found sustained interest in online courses across all sectors, there was a…
The MIT Press and other critics say proposed legislation to
limit public access to the results of some studies would work
against the open exchange of ideas.
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